Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish believes club can bridge gap with Manchester United next season

Kenny Dalglish and Sir Alex Ferguson, like their clubs, rarely stand in unison
on or off the pitch, but the Liverpool and Manchester United managers are in
accord over the latter’s assessment that the Anfield side will mount a
sustained Premier League title challenge next season.

Close rivals: Sir Alex Ferguson (right), the Manchester United manager, will be monitoring Liverpool's expected progress under Kenny Dalglish next seasonPhoto: GETTY IMAGES

Dalglish and his team face the unpalatable prospect of travelling to Arsenal on Sunday knowing that their first win against Arsène Wenger’s side in a decade would all but hand a record 19th league championship to Old Trafford, finally allowing Ferguson to achieve his long-stated aim of knocking Liverpool off their perch.

Yet both Scots believe Merseyside’s involvement in the destiny of next year’s title will be significantly less tangential. Dalglish accepts that there is much work to be done to restore Liverpool to a position from which they can regularly challenge United’s supremacy, but when Ferguson’s suggestion that both ends of the M62 will be in contention for honours next season was put to him, the 60 year-old simply quipped: “Told you he was a nice man.”

“Fergie’s not often wrong, is he?” said Dalglish. “How close are we? You would need to ask Fergie that. For us it is a work in progress.

“There is nothing we can do about [United winning a 19th title]. It will hurt the players and fans if we lose at Arsenal, too. We cannot concern ourselves with how others are doing. If they have set the bar high, then we have to get to that level.

“It has surprised me, as it has surprised everyone in football, that Liverpool have not won a title since 1990. But we have at least managed to add [to the club’s] five European Cups. That is a little bit of history for us to hang on to.”

It is likely to fall to Dalglish to begin to add to that history. The Scot’s future remains uncertain - he is deliberately coy on the subject, even suggesting that he does not know who will have the job of spending transfer money in the summer - but the remaining six games of the club’s season can be seen as a chance for him to examine what work requires doing when he is, as he surely will be, handed a permanent mandate.

“You learn something with every game and with every training session that takes you into a game,” he said. “Whether it is something about an individual or about your team collectively, not a day goes by that you do not learn something. But that is football. I am sure I am not alone in that.”

The framework of how he sees Liverpool in the forthcoming years, though, is already beginning to take shape.

Dirk Kuyt and Lucas Leiva have both signed contract extensions in recent weeks, while the production line taking talent from the club’s academy into the first team has been cranked into action once more, after around a decade lying fallow. John Flanagan, the teenage right-back who made his debut against Manchester City, is likely to be just the first of a handful of players to tread that path.

The centrepiece of Dalglish’s new Liverpool, though, is the pairing of Luis Suárez and Andy Carroll which, the Scot believes, clearly possesses the firepower to begin to bridge the gap with United, Arsenal, City and Chelsea.

“Their understanding is getting better,” he said. “But it is not just them. Against Manchester City, Dirk Kuyt and Raul Meireles were breaking forward to join them. With Steven Gerrard to come back [from the groin operation which has ended his season], to add to that firepower, it is starting to look a wee bit ominous. Someone will have money to spend in the summer, too, though who it will be remains to be seen.

“That makes life harder for a manager, having better players to choose from, but it makes it much easier to be successful.”